The Chinese Communist Party via TikTok has promoted ’terrible‘ messages to American children and is a ’very dangerous thing,’ he argues.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that he plans to uphold the divest-or-ban law on TikTok as the Chinese-owned social media platform went dark on Saturday evening.
On Sunday, Johnson spoke to NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and weighed in on TikTok’s decision as well as comments made by incoming President-elect Donald Trump that he would issue an executive order on the matter quickly after taking office on Monday.
“No, I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told the outlet, responding to a question about the message Trump would send if he pauses the ban. “And when President Trump issued the Truth post and said save TikTok, the way we read that is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership.”
Last year, members of Congress passed the ban on TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, over concerns that the platform is collecting sensitive data and information on Americans. The law required that ByteDance, which has long had an internal Chinese Communist Party committee with its own secretary, divest from TikTok within 270 days of the law being passed, which was Jan. 19.
“It’s not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about,” Johnson told the outlet. “It’s the Chinese Communist Party, and their manipulation of the algorithms.”
Those algorithms, he said, have been “flooding the minds of American children with terrible messages, glorifying violence, and anti-Semitism, and even suicide and eating disorders,” describing it as a “very dangerous thing.”
Last week, the White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement that how the United States will handle the TikTok ban is now up to Trump, who wrote early Sunday morning “SAVE TIKTOK” on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Also early Sunday, the president-elect that he would issue an executive order upon taking office Monday that will “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”
Ultimately, according to Trump, he would back a “a joint venture between the current owners” and any “new owners, whereby” the United States gets 50 percent ownership “with another partner.” He did not specifically say whether that would include ByteDance.
In his first administration, Trump had called for the ban on TikTok because of the risk it poses to Americans’ privacy and national security but has recently changed his tune. Trump has credited the app for helping him win the 2024 election.
During the 270-day period it was given to divest from TikTok, ByteDance held firm against divestment. Lawyers for the company argued before the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld Congress’s ban on the app last week, that the law violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The high court’s ruling upheld lower court rulings that allowed the ban to go through.
At oral arguments on Jan. 10, TikTok’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, told the justices that TikTok would “go dark” in the United States if the company did not prevail in its challenge to the law.
In oral arguments this month, Francisco said the app is one of the most popular speech platforms for Americans and said it would essentially shut down on Jan. 19 without divestiture.
Also, Francisco said that the real target of the law “is the speech itself … this fear that Americans, even if fully informed, could be persuaded by Chinese misinformation. That, however, is a decision that the First Amendment leaves to the people.”
However, the justices were not swayed and upheld the ban unanimously. They agreed that the law is intended to block attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to collect intelligence on Americans.
On Saturday evening, TikTok voluntarily shut down its platform, hours before the law took effect. The law stipulates that ByteDance must divest from TikTok or be cut off from app stores inside the United States. It does not preclude users from having it on their devices.
But on Sunday afternoon, TikTok said in a statement that it would return back online in response to comments that Trump had made. The social media app and its website were online as of Sunday at around 12 p.m. ET.